Food: We’re going vegan for august

So yeah, me and my boyfriend are going vegan for August. After a month of planning meals, food and diets, it’s nearly time for us to face our challenge and go vegan for the month. So far, we’ve learnt that a vegan diet takes a lot more planning than we anticipated but there is a lot more choice out there than we imagined.

After weeks of researching, we went to do our first ever vegan shop this weekend and it was quite a success. Not only did we spend less for the same amount of food than normal but we managed to treat ourselves to some things we normally don’t get in an attempt to save ourselves money. Everything we bought this weekend was from Aldi and Asda and we have more than enough food to give us plenty of ideas for the next month.

From breakfast to tea, we will be opting for meals which are interesting but completely different from our normal fare. As a mainly vegetarian household with the occasional meat, courtesy of my boyfriend, we are used to eating plenty of veg and making use of herbs and spices to make tasty but healthy food.

However, over the past few months, I know we have become very reliant on cheese, quorn and the same few staple meals and taking away those safety blankets will make us become more adventurous with our food. We’ve bought some of the vegan quorn range to add to meals but we are not relying on it as much as we usually do.

We plan on heading to The Incredible Nutshell, a vegan supermarket, in the next few days to pick up some new things to try such as vegan cheese and nutritional yeast to make some vegan pesto. I’m quite excited about getting started and trying some new ingredients to add to our day-to-day meals.

It’s not just our meals but snacks and drinks will also be all vegan so no more milk in tea for me and instead I’ll be opting for the fruit teas for this month. As too much milk makes me feel a little off anyway this is probably a good thing for me to try out.

I think August is a great time to try the vegan diet because if all else fails, I can opt for a salad which is 100% naturally vegan. However, we’re still going to really try to find new favourites and adapt trusty old recipes for the coming month and we’ll update our progress over the coming month too.

If anyone has any tips or recommendations of good places to eat for vegans in Sheffield, please let me know as we want to make the most of this month and explore the great things about the vegan diet. You can keep up with my daily updates on Instagram.